Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.